Anna Raccoon Archives

Post navigation

The Stick and Carrot Guide to Child Abuse.

The Anna Raccoon Archives

by Anna Raccoon on June 3, 2014

So often, what you are not told in court cases proves more interesting than what you are told.

Down in deepest Ceredigion, where the Teifi and the Dulas merge in a damp and noisy embrace, sits Lampeter. It has long been a refuge for those, who, how shall we say, wish to live an alternative lifestyle. It is cheap, and they are used to people smelling of goats rather than Chanel No 5. Just as well, since there are rather a lot of ladies who live with other ladies and prefer mating goats and wearing elderly second hand Peruvian sweaters. Inevitably, there is not a lot of money around.

There it was that Ms ‘X’ chose to rear her son. As her son grew into a fine young 15 year old – but still a child, he became aware of two things. Other people ate MacDonalds, and Chicken Nuggets, and Kebabs and everything; and there was a new wave of understanding for victims of child abuse. ‘They will be believed’. It was a turning point in his life.

So it was that he reported his Mother to Social Services. ‘Why, she feeds me nothing but oats and carrots’, he said. ‘Nooo’, cried Social Services, ‘that is horrific’. ‘And she makes me sleep on the floor’.

We can presume from the ensuing court case, that neither Social Services nor the Police ever set foot in the house to check what food might be in the cupboards, or whether there were indeed beds available. Why should they? Every allegation must be taken seriously these days, a ‘child’ has spoken.

And so they arranged for kindly foster parents to care for the boy, at taxpayer expense. They hired lawyers and wrote reports, and eventually turned up at Aberystwyth Magistrates Court in January where the angry Mum declined to enter a plea for herself, and so they played fair and entered a ‘not-guilty’ plea. The magistrates at Aberystwyth decided that this was far too serious a case for them to hear, and so they sent the case for trial at Swansea Crown Court.

Crown Court meant that Barrister had to be hired for both sides, and this was duly arranged. Six months later, after more reports, and case conferences, the great day arrived. Mum turned up in the regulation Lampeter sweater – and no shoes.

The boy turned up, along with the regulation social workers and ‘victim support’ and all the paraphernalia required to ensure that a child felt free to speak in the intimidating atmosphere of the mighty judicial system, and was invited to tell the court of the horrors of being fed carrots and oats. Was it just the once? Every Day? Were they broke that week?

He declined.

What was interesting is that the Crown had no other evidence to put forward. Not a social services report on the house, nor a report on the Mother. No investigation. Nothing. Just the ‘child’s allegation’.

So they had no choice other than to tell the woman she was free to leave the court. We will never know whether a genuine child abuser walked barefoot from court that day – because such is the strength of the ‘You will be believed’ mantra, we don’t investigate any longer. We just believe them.

As far as I know, the boy with the pristine colon and exceptional eyesight returned to his foster parents for a slap up supper…

Just one more small person consumed by the banality of evil….. or maybe two – the second of whom will not comprehend what has happened to his life until he is about 30 and ready to sue for Childhood Kidnap perhaps. Another triumph of the State that the tax-payer and the tax-payer’s children will be stumping up for.

There was a time (long ago) when I thought I had a reasonable grasp of things generally. That was in the days when common sense, logic, reason and consideration for others was the general rule for the vast majority. Ever since the touchy-feely politically correct busybodies have intruded into our conscious state things have been going downhill, aided and enthusiastically abetted by our dismal politicians and the plethora of quangos and ‘charities’ that have emerged. We are now almost inured to the stupidity of these times. Is there any hope for us?

Does this mean that I can have my mum taken to task for all that tinned corned beef I had to endure as a child? How I loathed that stuff. She should be put in a home because of that. Wait a mo, she already is in…

That’s all very well but now I have wasted another half an hour on Welsh local news. Including the story about the Hoff, and how he thought Wales was full of hobbits before scooping up a saleswoman from Debenhams in Merthyr. This is not healthy.

My dad used to (lightly) rap me & my brothers over the knuckles if we didn’t hold our knife and fork correctly. It was dreadful ‘child abuse’ but by age 7 I had impeccable table manners and you could take me anywhere and still can. My mother forced us all to eat a variety of vegetables she grew herself – rarely meat- and never deserts except the occasional rive pudding whilst pals got all sorts of treats. However I noticed as the years went on they got terribly overweight while I satyed slim with exceptionally clear skin and grew to love veggies and still do. Now I know it was evil child abuse and my parents should have been hauled before the magistrate.

A good many years ago I lived in Wales, Aberystwyth to be exact, as I was completing my PhD. Aber is bigger than Lampeter, and considerably more cosmopolitan, but under all this it is still a small Welsh town in the middle of nowhere much. Strange as it may be to some, most students absolutely loath that terrible day when they have to leave; the reason being that in places like this, everybody knows everybody else and nobody can keep a secret for very long. All small Welsh towns are gossipy, the smaller the town the more gossip there is. I cannot believe that in a place like Lampeter the police couldn’t just have a word with the neighbours (i.e. anybody else in town) and work out whether the kid was talking crap or not.

The entire story stinks of some muppet with an agenda twisting a case to fit a pre-conceived notion of what ought to be.

My family’s experience of social workers in child protection was such that we had the council accept that they had lied on file and in correspondence with the family, and failed to cover up the lies to such an extent we got an apology from the director of social services and from the elected councillor responsible for the department. They all appeared to leave their brains behind when they went in to work. I used to think that there was a need for social workers to spend at least ten years in the real world before they started training, but I am not certain many if any of those I have met would actually have learned anything.